Movie Maundering #3 – Constantine

Image: Constantine cover art. Copyright Warner Bros.

Plot

John Constantine has been able to see demons since he was a child. Nobody really knows why. Unfortunately for him, it has led everyone he knew to think that he was crazy, so he tried to kill himself. He was legally dead for two minutes, but then resuscitated. This leaves him damned in the eyes of God, having committed the deadly sin of suicide. In a quest for redemption of the highest order, Constantine spends his time banishing demons back to the plane of Hell to make the world a better place and find himself in Heaven as a reward.

During the normal course of business, he stumbles across a full-blooded demon trying to gain entry into the human world, which is apparently not allowed. After investigating with his cab-driver sidekick and a couple of twitchy contacts, he uncovers a plot to use the blood of a human psychic to attempt to break the bonds holding the demons in Hell. The son of the Devil, Mammon, wishes to manifest himself on Earth and create his own kingdom here. Constantine sets out to stop him.

Cast

Keanu Reeves, you are the bane of the film industry. Other big names grace the screen in this movie, though few of them add anything beneficial to it at all. Rachel Weisz is on screen a lot. You all remember her, right? And of course, the whiny Shia LaBeouf shows up a few times as the shitty sidekick. Although, I gotta say, Gavin Rossdale is pretty badass as a slick half-demon mastermind.

Weskimo’s Take

This movie is awful. It’s hard to even describe how dumb this movie is. After you sift through all the religious rhetoric being tossed around, you are left with absolutely nothing. Lackluster acting and a weak story combine to give birth to this atrocity of a movie.

Keanu Reeves plays a chain-smoking, demon-exorcist, who is terminally ill from the chain-smoking, trying to buy his way into Heaven by doing good things, but because it’s a selfish reason, Heaven gives him a big “Thanks anyway, but fuck you.” However, it’s this damned soul who is apparently God’s only champion on Earth with a clue. Right. This movie might as well have been the Matrix for all the sense it makes. He slits his wrists, and time stops? What the ever-loving crap is that about? He must be The One or something. Jesus.

Rachel Weisz, who I have to admit I don’t mind looking at, didn’t add anything useful to the movie. She had a couple of bad dreams, then got kidnapped and drowned in a bathtub. Twice. And I seriously spent the whole movie expecting freaking Brendan Fraser to run in and save her from the scary decomposing monsters. Shia LaBeouf makes his usual attempts to be useful or funny and really accomplishes nothing throughout.

It seemed like the movie was trying very hard to either impress or scare us with all of its special effects, but ended up doing neither. A demon made of shifting bugs attacks Constantine once, and otherwise there are some glowing eyes and some dead-looking humanoids we call demons which turn to ash when Neo, I mean Constantine, looks at them wrong. Oh, and some lights go out. That’s about it.

This movie was a giant Heaven-Hell circle-jerk. There are rules flying all over the place, different types of demons coming and going that nobody bothers to explain, and a couple of silly psychic humans. I wish I had a dollar for every minute this movie sucked, because I would have $121 dollars right now. Congratulations Warner Bros. You’ve managed to make a movie about redemption with no redeeming qualities.

Scoring